Liquid printers aren’t anything new, but a moving athlete made out of water that actually runs and kicks is definitely something you don’t see every day.

In its new ‘Water Made Active’ ad for G Active, Gatorade pushes the boundaries by creating a stop-motion athlete using drops of water, precision-timed strobe photography and a liquid printer.

As if the result alone wasn’t impressive enough, the team has revealed that the commercial was made entirely in-camera. James Medcraft, the project’s director of photography explained, “We’re using the flash to freeze the water droplets at a very precise moment in space, and we’re having to do that with millimeter and microsecond accuracy.”

The liquid printer, which took 5,000 man-hours to build, comprises more than 20,000 parts and 2,048 individual nozzles. Each nozzle turned on and off within two milliseconds. The printer would drop frame-by-frame animations, which the strobes would freeze in mid-air via flash. To create the motion sequence, the team charted data from a real athlete who ran, jumped, and kicked while wearing sensors.

Gatorade has also released a behind-the-scenes video of the commercial, which can be viewed below.